speaking of crazy ex-girlfriend, wait what, it's just me literally talking about it all the time to everyone in my life?? oh well I have no goddamn clue how we're only up to episode 4 this season? It feels like they took cues from The Good Place in just how goddamn breakneck the plotting has felt compared to the prior two seasons, which gives the entire thing this incredibly right feeling that the snowball has hit that momentum point where everything is absolutely unstoppable now in this downward spiral. Scary Scary Sexy Lady is probably the only song from this season so far that I haven't been totally in love with despite it being hilarious, but goddamn if stuff like Let's Generalize About Men and Strip Away My Conscience haven't been completely top-shelf.

Also I finally watched the first episode of Fargo last night and .. yeah, I think I'm gonna need to watch more. Jesus christ Martin Freeman.

Amazon is apparently trying to turn Lord of the Rings into a TV series.

I can think of a lot of reasons LotR would work as a TV series, and four reasons why it's a dumb idea:

1. It's already a movie trilogy;2. The movies are good;3. The movies are still pretty recent;4. There are a whole lot of other books that could be adapted as TV series that don't meet criteria 1-3.

Some of #4 are already in development for TV; Dark Tower and His Dark Materials are both examples of books that got turned into poorly-received movies that are trying again on TV. If we're to stick with the "fantasy series with the word 'Dark' in the title that got made into movies that bombed" theme, might I also suggest The Dark is Rising?

Though it will surprise no one that my first pick for something I'd like to see turned into a TV series (er, again) is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Given the announcement that it's set between Hobbit and LotR, I'm thinking that probably means Silmarillion is still off-limits. But there's still plenty of stuff in that timeframe to play with.

Young Aragorn's years in Rohan and Gondor (under the assumed name Thorongil) seems like there's a lot of potential material there. And Aragorn and Denethor are roles that people probably won't be too upset to see recast in a prequel. (I don't think anybody wants to see somebody other than Ian McKellen play Gandalf.) Hell, you could even pull a plot twist on the audience and not tell them upfront that Thorongil is Aragorn.

I'd be interested in seeing what the Dwarves are up to as well; we never get much of the story of what happens to them after The Hobbit. I know that Durin son of Thorin becomes King Under the Mountain (and of course that Balin dies in Moria and Gloin and his son Gimli go to the Council of Elrond), and IIRC he eventually dies in the War in the North, but it seems like there's a lot more they could do with that story.

Also, the time between Gandalf leaving the One Ring in Frodo's care and returning to throw it in the fire and test its nature is seventeen years. The movie glosses over this detail but does not explicitly contradict it. There's plenty of story that can be fitted in there (and if the show really feels the need to use Gollum -- which it absolutely does not need to -- this would be the logical place to put him).

Psych: The Movie isn't exactly a triumphant return to form, but it's a decent enough roadmap for keeping the series alive with the occasional TV movie. It was fun, I laughed, and it was great that they got everybody back together, including a couple of the old guest stars.

Timothy Omundson's brief appearance was bittersweet; he'd just had a stroke, so they had to cut his part down to a single scene, shot separately from everybody else, and...you are clearly looking at a guy who's just had a stroke. I appreciate that he was able to do it at all, and that they accommodated him, and from what I've read it was a minor stroke and he's recovered, so hopefully we'll get another Psych TV movie sometime and he'll get to play a more prominent role.

All in all, it wasn't quite up there with the best of Psych, and it wasn't an ideal jumping-on point for new viewers (note: the ideal jumping-on point for new viewers is Season 2, Episode 1: American Duos, which guest stars Tim Curry as Simon Cowell), but it was a solid entry and a good new direction.

I'm 6 episodes into Runaways and I think it's the first Marvel show that's consistently good, from the beginning. (SHIELD had a really bumpy start, and I haven't seen all of the Netflix shows but the ones I've seen feel like they'd be better if they didn't have to fill 13-episode season arcs -- the second season of Daredevil would have been perfect if it had ended with the fourth episode).

It's interesting to think about just how important teen drama is to the Marvel formula, and how it was completely absent from the MCU until Spider-Man: Homecoming, owing to Marvel's two main teen series (Spider-Man and X-Men) being tied up with other companies.

I've never read the Runaways comics (I'm a fan of BKV, especially Saga, but for some reason never got around to that one -- and come to think of it I've been one book away from finishing Y: The Last Man for years now), so I don't know how close the adaptation is. But it's a good solid update to the '60s Stan Lee "teen heroes with problems" formula.

"A humorless samurai, nearly desperate for work, agrees to assassinate a goblin cat that is accused of possessing a man's soul." "Masterless Samurai Kyutaro Madarame is hired by a dog-loving gang to get rid of their rival gang's beloved pet, an adorable white cat.

Upon raising his sword, however, he cannot bring himself to go through with the act and the cat melts his heart."

I think Silicon Valley's in a good place, in that after the season premier, all my questions are about character: their thoughts, their morals, their relationships.

To wit: what does Jared think about all this?

To a large extent, the series has become about Richard slowly turning into Gavin Belson. He's not there yet (and this episode is very deliberately bookended with scenes that demonstrate Richard being the same old nervous chump he's always been), but he's well on his way.

I would argue that the climax of season 4 was Jared's resignation: his confronting Richard for going too far, and Richard's subsequent epiphany and apology.

But in the season 5 premier, Richard creates a botnet to bankrupt a competitor so he can buy out the staff. That certainly seems like it's every bit as unethical as the pineapple scheme that Jared resigned over, but we don't see Jared's reaction, we just see him standing by Richard in the last scene.

So what's going on in his head? He's clearly rationalizing somehow. He has to know what Richard did -- if he doesn't, it's because he's deliberately ignoring it. We don't actually see Richard explaining his plan to the crew, so it's possible that Jared decided he had to get up and go to the bathroom for a few minutes so he wouldn't hear it. Or it's possible he's okay with this when he wasn't okay with the pineapples because this was retaliation: Richard was responding to provocation this time. Or maybe the difference is that there were no innocent victims; Richard saved SliceLine's employees from an unsustainable business model and gave them jobs at a better company, and the only people who suffered were the CEOs who backstabbed him. Or maybe he's just sticking around because he thinks Richard needs him as his conscience.

The show's good enough at character that I think these questions are going to be addressed later. Jared is definitely rationalizing; we don't know exactly how. I'm interested in seeing how it plays out.

I'd put odds on the season ending with Jared "saving" Richard from doing something horrible by doing something horrible himself -- that kinda already happened when he set up all those fake accounts a couple of seasons back, but the show is ultimately a sitcom. Recycling the same plot beats over and over again is what sitcoms do.

I started watching Timeless as something dumb to put on while I did work. First episode seemed full of smug jags and laughably implausible time travel antics.

By episode three I am in love with every character and cannot get enough of how bad this trio is at time travel. It's written surprisingly well and is not afraid to make everyone look like they have no idea what the fuck they're doing.

Time travel in this show has two rules:

1. There needs to be the nerdy scientist Rufus in the group, since he is the only one who knows how to pilot their shitty prototype time machine as they pursue the top-of-the-line Apple-sleek production version across history.

2. They can't have more than three people in the ship at one time, so it comes down to Engineer Nerd, Gun Man and History Gal.

That leads to about four things I love about this show:

1. The main trio constantly finds themselves utterly unable to pass themselves off as natives of the time period, due often to assumptions people from our time have about people from the past. They go back to the wild west, and everyone is completely ignorant of the fact that the sheriff the Lone Ranger was a based on was black, or the fact that "Tonto" means "fool" in Spanish, so native american lawman that Tonto was based off is immediately offended by the main cast.

2. The shit they get into is buck wild. It's not uncommon for them to warp to a time period, get in a gunfight with the villain, accidentally kill Thomas Edison, and lose their incredibly timeline-up-fucking modern pistol. At one point they try to go back to the 80's to stop the birth of a murderer and Rufus ends up having to awkwardly try to seduce the serial killer's mom so her and her future husband don't bone down later that night. They're all so endearingly in over their heads.

3. They're really good at having the main historical figure be a woman or person of color that history only recently started to overtly recognize.

4. I kinda dig the secret society plotline, since it spans across all of U.S. history and gives them a solid reason to be a key events.

And on the subject of time-travel shows: Have I mentioned how Legends of Tomorrow has become the best DC show?

In last week's episode, titled "Guest Starring John Noble", they realized that Mallus had exactly the same voice as Mallus, and so they traveled back in time to when Lord of the Rings was being filled to get a recording of John Noble's voice.

And then, as they approached the obligatory "heroes gather all the mystic geegaws to try and stop the ancient evil from reviving" plot point, Sarah decided, fuck it, why don't we just let the ancient evil revive so we can use the mystic geegaws to fight him?

The show has gotten so postmodern that it might as well switch Vixen out for Animal Man.

(Also: I've read that Matt Ryan's John Constantine is going to be a regular cast member next season. That has to mean we're going to meet Johanna Constantine, right? I mean, if you put John Constantine on a time-travel show and didn't have him go back in time and meet his great-great-grandmother, that would be a huge missed opportunity.

Also also: I sure wish people would quit mispronouncing Constantine's name. The last syllable is pronounced like "tine", not "teen". Wikipedia has a couple of references on that, plus in Swamp Thing #76 the Demon rhymes "Constantine" with "pantomime".)

The thing that bugs me most about Timeless at this point (spoilers for the end of season 1 and the beginning of season 2 follow):

Emma's heel turn makes no sense.

I mean, I get the hook that Rittenhouse has placed sleeper agents throughout history just in case they're ever needed.

But she spent eight years in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Why the fuck would you put a sleeper agent in a cabin in the middle of nowhere?

Even assuming they somehow knew that Flynn would seek her out (but didn't know exactly when; hence the waiting around for eight years), why did she spend the back third of the season teaming up with him instead of doing something to try and stop him?

I understand the reason for the retcon -- the show needed to keep her in the role of rival time-traveler, and that meant she had to move from Team Flynn to Rittenhouse -- but it's pretty clear that that twist was added later and not part of their original plan, or they would have gone to some effort to make it make some kind of sense.

Yeah, her alliance with Rittenhouse makes zero sense. Also hurts her character, since she's gone from being fairly interesting to being just weirdly super evil and vindictive. I don't even think she's a believer in the Rittenhouse doctrine or anything.

Gotta say, the most recent Silicon Valley kinda really irritates me the more I think about it. An A-plot about how hard it is to be a Christian and how they're a minority that faces discrimination can kinda fuck completely off, y'know?

TA wrote:Gotta say, the most recent Silicon Valley kinda really irritates me the more I think about it. An A-plot about how hard it is to be a Christian and how they're a minority that faces discrimination can kinda fuck completely off, y'know?

It didn't offend me, but it was pretty hacky. I don't think they were trying to make any kind of point, but as a subverting-the-expected joke goes, it's about as sophisticated as a Yakov Smirnoff "in Soviet Russia" gag. It kinda feels like it would have felt more at home on King of the Hill.

I also think they dragged it out too much. I think it would have worked fine if it had just been the punchline of the meeting scene, but using it to drive the main conflict of the episode was really beating a dead horse.

Speaking of main conflicts, Pied Piper vs. Jian-Yang isn't really working for me. His scam to get named as Erlich's heir was one of those things the show occasionally does that breaks its internal reality.

On the plus side, we seem to be past that phase of the arc and into a more plausible and traditional "Pied Piper has to deal with copyright infringement by a Chinese company" conflict. That's also potentially fraught -- oh boy, more Chinese stereotypes! -- but it at least feels more consistent with the show's usual dynamic.

(It frankly feels a bit like a course correction -- like they were sitting in the writers' room and realized "Man, this 'Jian-Yang is a partner in the company' plot really isn't working." I remember reading an interview -- last season? the one before? Whichever one started out with Jack as the CEO of Pied Piper -- where they said that the skunkworks plot was intended to last for most of the season but they realized it wasn't working, so instead they just had Richard and co spend an episode planning it and then immediately fuck it up and move on to the next thing.)